But the toolbox in Earl Rooker’s truck had been photographed in 2003, during a records check nobody followed up on, and in that photograph there is a gap in the foam insert, and the shape of the gap matches what they pulled out of the culvert.
There was also a woman named Bernice Hull, seventy-four by then, who had told a deputy in 2003 that she saw an older heavyset white man at the pumps and then never heard from anyone again. Her statement was in the file. It had been in the file the whole time.
My trial lawyer never got it. Or got it and didn’t read it. He died in 2014 so there’s no asking him.
The hearing took two days.
On the second day the judge, a woman named Patricia Okonkwo who was not even on the bench when I went in, took a forty-minute recess and came back and vacated my conviction, and the state announced it would not retry.
